Summary of Outbrief
The consensus from Dr. Nancy Kopell and her colleagues: "…fundamental understanding of neuroscience is going to have a tremendous impact on the mission of DARPA in the next decade or so."
The group acknowledged that a great deal is known already about human cognition, but the impact of new knowledge will significantly increase the capability to deal with manpower issues, including learning and recall, arousal and sleep, time-constrained decision-making, and monitoring for preparedness. The application of newly gained knowledge may lead to the creation of bi-directional brain-machine interfaces that will allow brain signals to control machines and machine signals to communicate to humans. Also, brain-like devices can be used for artificial sensing, particularly to help people who must operate quickly during periods of "information overload." Finally, Dr. Kopell believes that information acquired from the understanding of cognition and motor control will allow the construction of autonomous systems that can act in the world.
The group's report further identified opportunities for work in both collecting information and in its understanding and interpretation—both "critical" tasks according to Dr. Kopell.
In the collection arena, she highlighted the need to improve the simultaneous monitoring of large ensembles to noninvasively get good spatial and temporal resolution. As an example, new technologies are being developed to use in vitro cultured circuits of neurons. Finally, Dr. Kopell explained that new genetic methods are being developed to measure and manipulate circuits and their actions.
Regarding understanding and interpretation, she highlighted the group's consensus that increased involvement with mathematics, computer science and engineering will enable development of "nonlinear models to think about single cells, implications for networks, and how networks interact with other networks." She also underscored the requirement for more work on the decoding of population responses.
The possibility of using knowledge from neuroscientists to augment human capabilities to be able to sense and act was described by Dr. Kopell is the most exciting idea to come from the group.
Finally, she joined other presenters in emphasizing the value of education, and creating an answer to the "how to we get from there-to-there?" question. Training programs must be changed, she asserted, to create cadres of people who can collaborate across academic and technical disciplines, secure in knowing each other's language and professional perspectives. |
